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The data impetus: the Anglo-Saxon discussion of 2009. Part 3 of the Year in Review

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Exciting developments in the social sector are being tracked in Anglo-Saxon countries. Those discussions will eventually also play an increasing roll here at home.

Data, Measurement, Efficacy
Following the financial crisis in the USA many organisations have, among other steps, refocused their energy toward measuring and conveying their impact. In the intensified competition for funding, only those organisations will succeed who are able to show that their labour is actually fruitful.

Lucy Bernholz, the author of one of my favourite blogs, Philanthropy 2173, has identified the following trends for the American non-profit sector:

Data dominates the discussions
Whereas organisations used to pose to themselves the question “Should we measure our work?”, nowadays the question tends to be “What should we measure?” This clarifies that the portion of administrative costs in the total budget of an organisation is not the only important figure but rather a metric that makes sense only in relation to the assessment of an organisation’s actual overall achievement.

In the last year, an entire horde of new measurement instruments have been developed and placed for use online, including Acumen Fund’s BACO, REDF’s SROI, Keystone’s Constituency Voice, and many other tools that are all summarized in the TRASI databank. (TRASI is the offspring of a cooperation between McKinsey’s Social Sector Office and The Foundation Center and offers information for 150 different tools – from questionnaires and surveys to certification protocols – all targeting the question of effectiveness among social projects).

Higher demand for transparency
Online technology makes it possible to save, structure and access data. Alongside this capability is a growing demand for transparency: if there is data, we would like to see it. That’s why, according to Bernholz, data are the new platform for change.

The USA offers an entire buffet of websites, such as GreatNonprofits, Charity Navigator, Guidestar, InsideGood, Philanthropedia, and Give Well that serve as non-profit directories as well as give an internal look into the organisations’ structures, finances and evaluations. With this basis, it has become increasingly easier to assign a ranking to the organisations and initiatives, which in turn can radically influence the stream of donations.

The new website Philanthropy In/Sight proves just how far this transparency can go with their comprehensive Google map showing in which regions and for which topics foundations and other non-profits are spending their money. In a similar vein, other websites such as Where Does My Money Go? show where public funds (in this case in Great Britain) are being administered. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote an enlightening blog post about the new demand for transparency on the PSD Blog of the World Bank.

Augmented reality
The same author writes an overview of Development Squared, the successor of Development 2.0, in which he outlines the implications of the newest web technologies (such as augmented reality, an “expanded” reality) for the policy and development sector. Insofar as it’s already possible with Google’s new goggles to identify and receive information about one’s surroundings simply by taking a photo (of a building, a house or a product) with one’s mobile telephone, it doesn’t seem a long stretch in the future to provide accessible information about wells, refugee camps or health stations.

Where is the German directory of non-profit organisations?
Whereas “Impact Investing” was one of the most important buzzwords in the USA for 2009 according to Bernholz—meaning a reorientation toward quantifiable financial, social and ecological impact-measurements—this development has only just arrived among larger German foundations, where it plays a minor roll in the choices of individual private donors. Although recent polls show that German donors would also like to know where their money has gone and what concrete difference it has made, we are still a far cry from requiring the kind of standards that could even closely resemble those that we call for in the business sector.

The first step in Germany is to establish a simple, accessible comparison of non-profit organisations. After the previous failure of Guidestar to do just that in Germany, this will prove to be one of the largest challenges in the coming years. There are however already examples of starting points in Germany, among them Transparency International’s Transparent Initiative for the German Social Sector, followed by catalogue of disclosure requirements that we hope will gain broad acceptance.

In Part 4, the last of these year-in-review posts, I will address new developments in Crowd sourcing. And – again many thanks to Becky for translating my German “2009-in-review”-blogpost!

Posted in development 2.0., feedback, impact measurement, joana breidenbach | 1 Comment »

Open for diversity … and fraud?

Monday, July 6th, 2009

In contrast to all other comparable donation plattforms, betterplace.org is open, i.e. everybody can post a social project, regardless of whether the project managers organisation is recognised as charitable by the German tax authorities or not. In fact – our enthusiasm for a few small NGOs, unknown in Germany, led to the creation of betterplace, as we wanted to give them a broader support base.

Openness creates diversity and momentum: on betterplace we also especially welcome approaches using entrepreneurial methods for poverty alleviation and social justice. Many of which are not charities, even if they need starting capital via donations. At the same time we want to encourage private inidviduals to become active changemakers and use betterpace as a free-of-charge tool to raise support for their causes. And finally, there are so many amazing foreign NGOs, which have simply not registered for charitable status with the German tax authorities, because their support base is elsewhere, in Nepal or Columbia.

Yet openness also creates a risk: the official stamp of the German tax authorities may only be a very technical and limited guarantee, that the money is being spent on the stated goals of the organisation, but it is a guarantee nevertheless.

betterplace.org is an enabler, matching givers and takers, donors and beneficiaries. We strive to built a transparent system. A system in which you will have to judge for yourself which people and organisations to trust and which not. Of course, you will also find „bad“ (i.e. ineffective and even counterproductive) organisations trying to raise money online. But according to our 18 months long experience, the chances that people donate to those on betterplace may actually be smaller than in the „normal“ offline world. Because as readers of this blog (or of William Easterly or Danbisa Moyo) will know, there have been a good many bad development projects around for a long time, projects financed by our taxes and private donations.

Now, with a plattform such as betterplace.org, there is a whole range of new projects easily available. In order to help donors find the projects they can trust we are counting on three different trust mechanisms (and this is not counting the increasing number of technological tools used in order to stop potential fraudsters right at the beginning, i.e. when they are posting a project.)

Three trust mechanism

The current Web of Trust, depicts 3 different kinds of trust.

There is, first of all, „institutional trust“. This is evoked when the German tax authorities grant charitable status to an NGO. In addition there are certifications such as the DZI Spendensiegel and the reputation of a brand such as Misereor, The Red Cross/Crecsent or UNICEF.

Secondly, there is personal trust, the trust which develops because a friend, collegue or family member recommends a project. We know from donation statistics that a significant number of people donate after somebody close to them has asked them to do so.

And thirdly, we have trust created by „swarm intelligence“, an evaluation of projects according to the discussions and ratings of a large number of people. We see this already forming on betterplace.org: active projects, which have many visitors, donors and advocates are receiving more donations than other, more passive ones. Success creates success.

This last type of trust can be greatly improved. Participartory web 2.0. technology will give an increasing number of people a voice (people, who haven’t had a voice before, because they are far away from the donors and have little financial and social capital). These new voices will help us detect fraud – has the school really been build? And measure effectvity – Did the workshop really help migrants?

(more on this and what we at betterplace are doing to optimize the web of trust, in a later post)

Well informed donors

In the betterplace team we have an ongoing discussion about the kind of tools donors need in order to make an informed choice. We are also asking ourselves whether our communication with betterplace users is sufficient. Do you, as a user of betterplace, know that you are on an open plattform and that we don’t check the projects ourselves? (we do check though whether an organisation claiming to be charitable in Germany is so, as we hand out donation receipts). Do we sufficiently disclose the self-regulatory nature of the plattform? And do we stress that you as a donor are responsible for making the right donation choice?

A few days ago we decided to be more explicit and included the following sentence under each project:

betterplace.org is an open platform on which anyone can upload their project. This project is recognized as charitable by german tax authorities. We recommend that you support this project, especially if you know the project responsible, an advocate or visitor to the project, or perhaps you know the organisation, or a friend has recommended it to you – and because you feel that the project is meaningful and worthwhile supporting.

What’s your opinion about this?

Is it a helpful reminder that we at betterplace are responsible for the running of an efficient and sensible infrastructure, whereas you – the potential donor – is responsible for a good and sensible choice of where to allocate your Euro?

Or does this sentence look to you rather like a disclaimer, like the small print of a medication, warning of its potentially harmful sideeffects? Are we distancing ourselves too much from what are, in all likelyhood, well-intentioned and good projects, worthy of our support?

We’ll be coming back to these questions over the next couple of weeks and would very much welcoime your feedback. What is your gut reaction to the sentence? Do you find the message useful or does it turn you off? Which alternatives would you recommend?

We are looking forwrd to your feedback!

Tags: betterpace.org, feedback, trust
Posted in betterplace.org, development 2.0., feedback, joana breidenbach, web of trust | No Comments »

The magic of transparency

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Since the beginning of this year, as we started actively approaching aid organizations to present their work on betterplace, I have had many conversations with fundraisers and project managers. In these discussions I am trying to find out how to improve the interface between betterplace.org and organisations of differend sizes, from small grassroots initiatives to large, international aid organisations. We obviously want many organisations to use the plattform, as we offer our services free of cost and enable organisations to lower their fundraising costs. Lower fundraising costs means more money can go to where donors want it to go: to the project.

Projects and needs – an illusionary world?

On betterplace.org donors support specific projects, broken down into even smaller needs. Project managers are asked to keep supporters up to date about the progress of the project and inform them once the financed need has been realized.

This procedure is not without its critics. Organisations, especially large ones, are used to work with global budgets, which they allocate according to their internal dynamics. They tell me: „This is not how we work. The donations we collect in Germany are handed over to our international headquarters and they forward them to the projects. We only hear once a year about what has been done with them in the field.“ Others remark that their budgets are so huge that no way can they give feedback about the realisation of specific needs.

After these discussions I am sometimes asking myself, whether our demand for greater transparency is so much at odds with the workings of large organisations, that we are in danger of creating an illusionary world, whereby organisations post a project in „the betterplace-way“, but can’t honestly deliver what we are asking them to do.

For many (I would say most) organisations and initiatives on betterplace.org our approach is no doubt working fine. A grassroots initiative sich as Cecil Kids Center in Mombasa doesn’t have any funding sources outside of betterplace. The project volume iss mall and tasks such as the building of 2 latrines ort he renovation of a classroom can be broken down nicely. Once the donations have come together, the work can start and a few weeks later, donors receive a message in the form of a blogpost by the project manager, accompanied with photos, that the project has been finished.

Large NGOs on the other hand have many different sources of funding. The fundraisers who present the organisations projects are located far from the field and might themselves get only irregular and indirect information about the progress of the project.

Is betterplace only suitable for small grassroots initiatives?

Is the betterplace way for these latter organisations only a marketing tool, used to get donors to open their pockets, as donors prefer to contribute to specific tasks and needs rather than to large global budgets?

I believe, not. Even a huge social project has a budget and knows what will be needed for its realisation. And there is no reason why a huge transnational NGO shouldn’t be able to inform its donors in word and image, what has been accomplished with their help. (and some large organisations used betterplace wonderfully in this way).

Let’s take a random project on betterplace, A winter proof house for Tadzhikistan (btw, a project I find really worthy of our support).

Of course it would be wrong for donors to assume that once someone has donated 70 Euro for a door, the organisation will go out and use this very money to buy a door. But what I can expect as a donor is that a door will be bought as part of the project realization and that the organisation will sent me proof of this purchase by posting a picture of the houses built.

The difference donors make, should be made visible

That’s what ist all about: people who contribute to a project with money, time, expertise or donations in kind, have a right to know what happens with their money. They have a right to see the difference they help to make. Of course, this is not always possible. A number of poverty alleviation measures and programmes don’t have quick and visible results, their impact can only be measured over a longer period of time. How do you want to measure improved self-esteem? But in many cases visible proof is possible. When I have contributed to the building of a classroom, that classroom can be documented and the success of the project measured.

Too many well-intentioned aid projects fail. Last month, on my trip through Usbekistan, I heard about a number of large projects, financed in the 1990s by the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) which simply evaporated, as the money went into the deep pockets of corrupt politicians and businesspeople.

Transparency and communication fight corruption

Transparency openes up the blackbox „aid“ and fights corruption. Let’s take the case of an organisation in Cambodia which lists on betterplace what will be needed for the construction of a new internet cafe. They break down the project into cement, stones, doors, windows, electric systems, laptops etc.. Now other people on the plattform, with intimate knowledge of the local, cambodian construction scene, can come in and comment on the prices beeing listed and disclose if they are „real“ or include major kickbacks.

Transparency is more often than not a question of communication. Nobody wants projects managers to slavishly stick to once posted needs, which turn out to be counterproductive. The core issue is how you communicate what is happening on the ground.

One more example: Marcus Vetter, project manager from Cinema Jenin, recently told me that he didn’t use the donations received via betterplace for the „renovation of the 1st dozen of cinema chairs“ for the renovation of 12 chairs. This would have been impracticle and expensive. Instead he uses the first funds received to buy the material needed for all 500 chairs. The rest of the work will be done once the money has come together.

I believe the majority of donors doesn’t care in which sequence the work is being done. What matters is whether the chairs will be renovated by the time the cinema opens ist doors.

Tags: accountability, aid organisations, corruption, needs, projects, transparency
Posted in accountability, aid industry, betterplace.org, development 2.0., feedback, fundraising, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

Accountability counts – but make sure, its the right kind

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Earlier this week I attended an inspiring 2 day workshop at the Berlin Civil Society Center.

The topic was “Exploring Mutual Accountability“ and some of the top CEOs and program directors of the large development INGOs (Oxfam, Terre des Hommes, Care, World Vision, Welthungerhilfe etc.) were present, as well as leading civil society think tanks from AccountAbility and A ctive Philanthropy to Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and Keystone.

Accountability to whom?
For Civil Society Organisations „accountability“ usually means the accountability of organisations receiving funds to those who provide the financial inputs: their donors (governments, corporations, foundations or private individuals).

One of the discussion strands at the workshop concerned how the many different, often conflicting, accountability regimes which different donors demand from organisations and whose fullfillment costs them millions of Euros, can be simplyfied and made more effective. There was a consensus, that there exists a lot of „toxic accountability“ (as Simon Zadek from AccountAbility called it), doing more harm than good.

One prominent ongoing attempt to standardise this kind of accountability is the INGO Accountability Charter, which was presented at the workshop by Jeremy Hobbes, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

Yet from my perspective, the really important discussions concerned a different accountability: the accountability of development organisations not to their financiers (which consists predominantly of rather technical and financial stuff, such as management procedures), but to the people they are supposed to serve: their clients, i.e. the poor and/or disadvantaged.

The reason why aid has failed
I have argued again and again that the main reason six decades of development aid have failed has to do with the fact, that aid organisations are NOT sufficiently held accountable for their performance. And all too often programs are badly designed and/or executed.

What do you – as a donor – know about the quality of the charity you support? Some, of course, know a lot, as they are involved in volunteering for a specific organisation. But the majority of us, don’t know much about how effective a development program has been.

This is a result of the huge power imbalance between NGOs – mostly Western organisations with millions to spend and their clients – often poor, illiterate and badly organized. The latter simply lack a voice. They can’t say what they need, nor complain if the services they recieved were inadequate or even harmful.

In order to empower the poor they need voice, yet this would automaticall take power away from the organisations.

As Burkhard Gnärig, former CEO of Save the Children and Director of the Berlin Civil Socitey Center writes:

Many civil society organisations talk about partnership, many talk about human rights, children’s rights and self determination but very few grant their local partners and beneficiaries tangible rights comparable to the rights they have to grant their own donors.

One of the results is, that in many non-Western countries, development organisations are considered less trustworthy than corporations:

The 2007 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that in Asia and Latin America Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are considered as less trustworthy than business. This is especially significant as CSOs spend hundreds of millions of Euros/Dollars in Asia and Latin America for the supposed benefit of the local population. The discrepancy between resources allocated and trust obtained indicates a strong lack of accountability, with a resulting lack of appropriateness of the projects CSOs run.

Give your clients a voice
Only beneficiary feedback can redress this situation. And some of the participants were very frank about badly run projects of their own organisations or that of others. Nevertheless there seemed to be a real gulf between the large INGOs and the participants representing leading think tanks and expert organisations.

Whereas the former acknowledged: yes, the situation is bad and we definitely need to incorporate more feedback from our „primary constituents“, the latter tend to look for more radical solutions.

The key questions revolved around: How much power are you willing to yield to others? How much voice are you willing to give to others, which – very probably – will challenge your work?

Thinking about it, it seems unlikely that INGOs will change fundamentaly. It seems very difficult to truthfully incorporate negative feedback, without completely undermining an organisation. „What do you do“, asked one participant, „if in a beneficiary evaluation, you find out that 85% or more of the recipients state that your organisations work has been useless or even harmful to them?“ Giving truthfull feedback might hugely undermine an NGO brand.

Yet, as the concept paper of the workshop rightly pointed out:

Empowering beneficiaries to seriously hold their donors accountable will do more for raising the average quality of projects than any other single step.

Here I obviously get very, very excited about the potential of betterplace.org and our web of trust. Because already now recipients can give feedback on services recieved. If the intervention they receive is on betterplace.org, they can post a statement as a visitor or advocate (well, the terminology for these roles will have to be rethought, as a refugee in a camp is hardly a „visitor“) on the project page.

So far only a few do so, such as the Namibian Benson Muramba, who wrote a visitors statement about what the funds received meant to him. Or the palestinian project Cinema Jenin, were (so far) 15 advocates, among them a number of local inhabitants, and 3 visitors voice their interest in the project and follow its realization.

But it is not hard to imagine, how this feature can be used for massive real-time reporting.

Better capital allocation
Thus it is with great excitement, that we are planning a cooperation between Good Root and Keystone International, with the aim of bridging the power gap by giving more people a voice and thus making it possible for donors to get a much more reliable impression of project quality. The result would be that more money is spend on those projects which deliver effective social change and that ineffective projects would feel the need to change their approaches. This is hardly as easy as it sounds, as social change is often difficult to measure. Still this is no excuse not to use those state of the art impact tools which sit around, waiting to be implemented.

Posted in accountability, development 2.0., feedback, joana breidenbach, web of trust | No Comments »

betterplace Workshop in Mali

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Youchaou’s school in Mali, Westafrika, is one of my favourites (well, I also have a few others, but this one is really good). And this, not only because my family and I visited the project last January and spent a great day and evening with Youchaou, Jürgen and the street children he supports with a daily meal in his courtyard. My enthusiasm has more to do with the approach itself – a local initiative strategically supported by outsiders in a respectful and cooperative way. Imagine my reaction when I received this photo:

It shows participants of a workshop in Bamako, Malis capital, learning how to use betterplace, so that the stakeholders of the project can blog about it directly. This is the idea of the Web of Trust: give as many people as possible a voice in order to increase – or shatter – trust for a social initiative.

I hope many people will support the scholarships for needy children.

Tags: betterplace workshop, Jürgen Nagler, Mali, Mali Initiative
Posted in development 2.0., digital divide, feedback, joana breidenbach, projects | No Comments »

3 lorries full of sand

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

The lorry offloads sand for the construction of the AIDS-Orphanage in Mombasa. betterplace-users donated 203 Euro for the purchase of three truckloads of sand.

A few weeks ago I already blogged about Ann Wambuas perfect feedback – the results have now been uploaded and can be seen here. Only drawback: the photos don’t (yet!) come with an individual comment.

Tags: Aids-orphanage, construction material, feedback, Mombasa
Posted in feedback, joana breidenbach, projects | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘feedback’ Category